Posts Tagged: hearing aids

Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays — delicious food, good spirits and lively gatherings of family and friends. But with my hearing loss, I sometimes worry I will miss out on some of the fun. Large dining room tables make conversation tricky, especially, like in my family, if everyone is talking at once. Background chatter combined with noise from the football games on television add to the overall din, making it a tough listening situation. What is a person with hearing loss to do? Follow these tips and have a very Happy Thanksgiving!

Hearing aids are now so sophisticated that they have features hardly anyone but audiologists are aware of, much less understand. Most of us just want to put them on and be able to hear, but like any device, the more you know the more you can benefit. This is as true of hearing aids as it is of smartphones and computers. In fact, the latest hearing aids are mini-computers.

What you give up when you lose your hearing can be different for everyone, but the things you will miss most are conversations, sounds and the feelings you get in return from them. Some familiar examples may include laughter with your family, discussing politics, listening to your favorite music, and watching crimes being solved on a TV show like NCIS

Today, Signia (formerly Siemens) unveiled the Signia Pure® 13 BT, the company’s first Made-For-iPhone (MFi) hearing aid, and the world’s first true telehealth-supported hearing aid with iPhone audio streaming capabilities. The Pure™ 13 BT is also the first hearing aid to use iPhone motion sensors to improve hearing for speech when walking, jogging, or in the car, and reportedly the first hearing aid to provide both “high-definition binaural hearing” and Bluetooth® audio streaming (from a connected device).

A new generation of rechargeable battery technologies promises to make life easier for hearing aid consumers in 2017. When two new rechargeable hearing aid models and an innovative new retrofit rechargeable battery system hit the market in late 2016, consumers finally got a choice of options as easy and convenient to charge as your cell phone.

Over the 23 years that I’ve been a hearing aid wearer, I’ve been described by several of the audiologists I’ve worked with as a “challenging” patient. Hopefully, for the most part, it’s a description that’s offered with a wry smile. I can’t tell you if that’s the case though, since I’m totally blind.